RELATIONS BETWEEN GREAT BRITAIN AND HER COLONIES IN 1850

BY THOMAS CARLYLE

CONSTITUTIONS for the colonies are now on the anvil ; the discontented colonies are all to be cured of their miseries by constitutions. One thing strikes a remote spectator in these colonial questions-the singular placidity with which the British statesman at this time is prepared to surrender whatsoever interest Britain, as foundress of those establishments, might pretend to have in the decision. "If you want to go from us, go; we by no means want you to stay; you cost us money yearly, which is scarce; desperate quantities of trouble too why not go, if you wish it?" Such is the humour of the British statesman at this time.

And yet an instinct teaches all men that colonies are worth something to a country; that if, under the present Colonial Office, they are a vexation to us and themselves, some other Colonial Office can and must be contrived that shall render them a blessing; and that the remedy will be to contrive such a Colonial Office, or method of administration, and by no means to cut the colonies loose. Colonies are not to be picked off the street, every day, not a colony of them but has been bought dear, well purchased by the toil and blood of those we have the honour to be sons of; and we cannot afford to cut them away because the present management requires money. The present management will

indeed require to be cut away;-but as for the colonies, we purpose, through Heaven's blessing, to retain them a while yet! Shame on us for unworthy sons of brave fathers if we do not. Brave fathers, by valiant blood and sweat, purchased for us, from the bounty of Heaven, rich possessions in all zones, and we, wretched imbeciles, cannot do the function of administering them! And because the accounts do not stand well in the ledger, our remedy is, not to take shame on ourselves, and repent in sackcloth and ashes, and amend our beggarly imbecilities, but to fling the business overboard, and declare the business itself to be bad.

Is there no value, then, in human things, but what can write itself down in the cash-ledger? All men know that to men and nations there are invaluable values which cannot be sold for money at all. Britain has other tasks appointed her in God's universe than the making of money.

This poor nation, painfully dark about said tasks and the way of doing them, means to keep its colonies nevertheless, as things which somehow or other must have a value, were it better seen into. They are portions of the general earth, where the children of Britain now dwell; where the gods have so far sanctioned their endeavour as to say that they have a right to dwell. England will not readily admit that her own children are worth nothing but to be flung out of doors! England looking on her colonies can say: "Here are lands and seas, spice-lands, corn-lands, timber-lands, overarched by zodiacs and stars, clasped by many-surrounding seas; wide spaces of the Maker's

building, fit for the cradle yet of mighty nations and their sciences and their heroism. Fertile continents, still inhabited by wild beasts, are mine, into which all the distressed populations of Europe might pour themselves, and make at once an Old World, or a New World human. By the eternal fiat of the gods, this must yet one day be; this, by all the divine silences that rule this universe, silent to fools, eloquent and awful to the hearts of the wise, is incessantly, at this moment, and at all moments, commanded to begin to be unspeakable deliverance; and new destiny of thousandfold expanded manfulness for all men, dawns out of the future here. To me has fallen the godlike task of initiating all that." -Ibid.

THE NECESSITY FOR THE EXPANSION OF

ENGLAND

BY THOMAS CARLYLE

WHY should there not be an "Emigration Service" and Secretary, with adjuncts, with funds, forces, idle navyships, and ever-increasing apparatus; in fine, an effective system of emigration, so that every honest, willing workman who found England too strait, the “organization of Labour" not yet sufficiently advanced, might find likewise a bridge built to carry him into new western lands, there to "organize" with more elbow-room some labour for himself; there to be a real blessing, raising new corn for us, purchasing new webs and hatches from us, leaving us at least in peace, instead of staying here

to be a Physical-Force Chartist, unblessed and no blessing? Is it not scandalous to consider that a Prime Minister could raise within the year, as I have seen it done, a

hundred and twenty millions sterling to shoot the French, and we are stopt short for want of the hundredth part of that to keep the English living? . . .

A free bridge for emigrants; why, we should then be on a par with America itself, the most favoured of all lands that have no government; and we should have, besides, so many traditions and mementos of priceless things which America has cast away. We could proceed deliberately to "organize Labour," not doomed to perish unless we effected it within year and day; every willing worker that proved superfluous finding a bridge ready for him. This verily will have to be done; the time is big with this. Our little isle is grown too narrow for us, but the world is wide enough yet for another six thousand years. England's sure markets will be among new colonies of Englishmen in all quarters of the globe. All men trade with all men, when mutually convenient, and are even bound to do it by the Maker of men. Our friends of China, who guiltily refused to trade, in these circumstances-had we not to argue with them, in cannon-shot at last, and convince them that they ought to trade! "Hostile tariffs" will arise to shut us out, and then again will fall, to let us in ; but the sons of England, speakers of the English language, were it nothing more, will in all times have the ineradicable predisposition to trade with England. Mycale was the pan-Ionian, rendezvous of all the Tribes

of Ion, for all Greece: why should not London long continue the All-Saxon-home rendezvous of all the "children of the Harz-Rock," arriving, in select samples, from the Antipodes and elsewhere, by steam and other wise, to the "season" here! What a future; wide as the world if we have the heart and heroism for it, which, by Heaven's blessing, we shall.

"Keep not standing, fixed and rooted,
Briskly venture, briskly roam ;
Head and hand, where'er thou foot it,
And stout heart are still at home.

In what land the sun does visit,

Brisk are we, whate'er betide:
To give space for wandering is it

That the world was made so wide.” *

Fourteen hundred years ago, it was by a considerable "Emigration Service," never doubt it, by much enlistment, discussion, and apparatus, that we ourselves arrived in this remarkable island.-Past and Present. 1843.

THE CAUSES OF ENGLAND'S GREATNESS

BY THE EARL OF BEACONSFIELD

I HAVE always felt that with the limited population of this United Kingdom, compared with the great Imperial position which it occupies with reference to other nations,

* Goethe, Wilhelm Meister.